Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 8GB DDR3 review

A low-profile take on the series, with a tasty lick of paint

For

Low profile design

Low voltage and temperatures

Good price for an 8 GB kit

Against

Can't overclock too far

Memory modules and CPU coolers don't always get along. Sometimes the cooler hangs over the memory slot on your motherboard so you can't fit the memory in the first and third slots, forcing you into the second and fourth; if your motherboard supports that configuration.

Sometimes the cooler and the RAM modules are so gigantic they barely fit together in a system in any configuration. The chief culprit is usually an indulgently large heat spreader atop each stick of RAM.

Corsair's Vengeance series is as guilty as any on this charge, so this LP model aims to right a wrong. These low-profile modules will give you no such grief. They are no bigger than the naked green DIMM modules of old, which allows potential for your CPU cooler to run amok in your case, taking up as much space as it damn well wants.

We found there's plenty of room to remove the nearest RAM module to the CPU while the cooler's still installed too, which saves a bit of messing around should you need to perform such a procedure.

The 'LP' aspect of this RAM is a success then, cutting CPU cooler conflict out of the equation. So what else does this Vengeance LP 8GB RAM kit have to offer?

LP but high style

Let's get the superficial stuff out of the way first. The heat spreaders are white. They look as nice as any RAM on the market, and would particularly complement Corsair's fellow albino, the Graphite series 600T white edition case.

This is a consideration for case modders and kit enthusiasts, but if all the glowing water coolers and dazzling LED fans of this world make you slightly nauseous, there are some further selling points in this Vengeance LP 8GB kit's bag of tricks.

V is for voltage

The chief trick is the voltage. It's clocked at 1.35V on these modules, roughly 0.3V lower than most modules. Frankly anything higher than 1.65V at stock settings puts your system in danger of overheating, imploding and tearing the space-time continuum.

We all saw how much of a hassle that was for Marty McFly and Donnie Darko, so it's best to avoid. The lower you go down the memory voltage limbo dance, the lower temperatures get. Being in such close proximity to your processor and having cooler memory is advantageous for keeping a healthy system ticking over into its old age.

These 1.35V modules run cooler to allow a more conservative heatsink design, but if you're hoping that opens up some headroom to tweak the speed and latency of this kit, you're in for a slight disappointment.

We weren't able to tinker with the latency settings (set at respectable stock values of 9-9-9-24) at all without our test rig falling over before POSTing, which is disconcerting but not entirely surprising. We did manage to clock the operating frequency up from 1,333MHz to 1,600MHz, giving a 1 to 2 frame per second increase in our gaming benchmarks.